Lately, if it’s Monday morning and I’m in Halifax, I am probably walking down to town after having returned the hire car, a route that passes a range of housing, from bourgeois to more basic. This view can’t have changed much in decades. Yes, I know it’s a little blurred, but I’m going for some kind of archaic but otherwise indefinable quality.
Had I posted this on the Wednesday or the morning after I would have had to question the notion that this extensive display of cirrus presaged a change in the weather, for the worse. But sure enough, Thursday night and Friday morning have just been pretty revolting, so there you have it. Autumn does seem to be here, in some form or other.
Nothing shall get through the Red Screen of Doom. Behind, a car park and some undefined ‘businesses’ may be ‘open as usual’ but we cannot know this for sure: these things may as well exist in another dimension.
Britain is too crowded to let any really extensive tracts of urban decay persist for too long, but some parts of Bradford city centre definitely qualify as ‘underused’ at the present time, and any bus heading north from the Interchange will pass through them. I guess it’s been a while since one could turn up at Keencost, pay cash, and carry away an entire kitchen. I’m not saying I have a problem with urban decay though — at least not photographically.
In the 21st century, even more than wearing hi-vis gear, the status of being in possession of a Filming Permit allows one to infiltrate public space with almost total impunity. The clutch of large and mysterious trucks, the erection of ‘No Waiting’ cones and signs proclaiming the colonisation of the area (in this case, the junction of Pall Mall and Booth Street, Manchester) until some unspecified time on Thursday…. it all cries ‘film set’ to me. The clincher is seen here, though. Clearly the production is of a period piece, 20th century stuff — because no one installs phone boxes like these any more. They’re definitely props — trust me.
Back hone. And here was the weather: a dozen of these seemed to sweep through the valley today. What the hell, I had to go back to work.
As seen on one side of the Eglise St. Jean-de-Grund, from atop one of Luxembourg’s dizzying verticals; specifically, the Rocher du Bock.
No further comment on the image itself, but I must note that something happened today which has been threatened before but never quite happened over the previous 5,499 days of this blog. Namely that I had a total camera breakdown thanks to a completely dead battery — which I could not replace today because it’s basically too old and the shop I tried did not stock it. It will therefore be out of action at least until I get home, although the kit needed replacing anyway (the camera I am presently using was always just stop-gap equipment). It’s just as well that phones take pictures these days, otherwise the blog would have ended today — and expect at least the next couple to be taken with my Google Pixel 6, itself getting a little knackered these days. Hi-tech photography this is not.
While this view is a bit “picture postcard” it would have been unreasonable not to include such a shot from this stay, for Luxembourg is a very attractive and dramatically-sited city, built around two deep gorges carved into sandstone plateaus. Pictorially, it certainly works.
I have been to a few of the world’s railway stations and the view from Blackfriars, built on a bridge over the Thames, is surely one of the best there is from any station. Turning one’s back on the trains to concentrate on it is quite logical.
She looks mildly disapproving, I think. But is the look for the pedestrian, or the photographer? Another one of the blue-themed pictures that have appeared over the last few days.
